Sunday, 8.16.2020 The Throughline is your portal to tomorrow, a view of the Bay Area at the intersection of reality and possibility. Our nine-week journey continues with a look at surveillance and law enforcement:
SAN FRANCISCO AT A CROSSROADS — ALTERED BY PANDEMIC AND PROTEST A SPECIAL REPORT BY CULTURE DESK WEEK SIX: REWRITING THE RULES
1 Can Berkeley redefine police work? 1 The case for releasing 50,000 prisoners in California
1 Peter Schwartz, Hollywood’s futurist, is hopeful for tomorrow Find more inside.
G2 | Sunday, August 16, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
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REWRITING THE RULES
E M PAT H Y A N D A STRONG STOMACH: QU I Z : COU L D YOU B E A C O N TA C T T R A C E R ?
tact tracing is about gathering information and steering people toward services, not trying to find a silver lining to a scary situation. Answer: No. Part of contact tracing is talking to people receiving potentially scary information about their exposure to or infection with the coronavirus. Minimizing what they’re feeling or forcing a sunny perspective is not helpful. 4 You’re trying to talk to a friend about a tricky decision she’s making, but when you ask questions that cut to the heart of the matter, she deflects. Do you keep trying, using different approaches to get at the issue? Answer: Yes. Not everyone is eager to share their friends’ information with contact tracers. Not everyone wants to discuss their symptoms with a stranger who isn’t their doctor or to acknowledge they might be infected. A contact tracer’s job is to use “motivational interviewing skills,” Celentano says, to rephrase your question or try different prompts and listen as carefully to what’s not being said as to what a person is sharing. Answer: No. If your personal mantra is more “let it go” than “stick it out,” you may struggle to connect with contacts and elicit their stories.
By Sarah Feldberg
ABOUT THIS SECTION Throughline is a Culture Desk limited-series project exploring what the Bay Area of the near future could look like after the effects of the pandemic and protests take hold. How could we use this moment to reshape our region for the better? On the cover: Check back each week as we reveal another portion of visual development artist Pong Lertsachanant’s rendering of the future of the Bay Area.
STA F F Throughline Editors Sarah Feldberg Robert Morast Designer Alex K. Fong Deputy Photo Director Russell Yip Creative Director Danielle Mollette-Parks Contributing Editor Bernadette Fay Managing Editor, Features Michael Gray
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San Francisco librarians, city attorneys, tax accountants: During the coronavirus pandemic they’ve all had their regular jobs interrupted and joined a corps of disaster service workers activated to help San Francisco officials follow the spread of the virus around the city. ¶ Their new gig? Contact tracing, like infection-tracking detective work minus the trench coat and cigarette plus a lot of empathetic listening. While the job requires some medical fluency, you don’t have to be a doctor or public health expert to do the work. “That’s the kind of beautiful thing. It takes a range of skills,” says Jess Celentano, deputy director of UCSF’s Institute for Global Health Delivery and Diplomacy, who is co-leading contact tracing for the Department of Public Health. “The thing that carries throughout is they have to be a fantastic listener and (be) patient. You have to unravel a story a lot of times.” Those stories are vital to finding people who are infected with or may have been exposed to COVID-19, and getting them the help they need to take care of themselves and prevent spreading the virus to others. “It’s really hard listening to peo-
5 You make yourself a to-do list. Do you give each item your full attention rather than sprinting through the list for the satisfaction of crossing it off? Is taking your time never a waste of time? Answer: Yes. Contact tracing can be slow work, says Celentano. While a straight-forward call might take 20-30 minutes, a complex case or a household cluster might mean spending as long as 1½ hours on the phone. You’re trying to get a “full picture of a dynamic human,” says Celentano. “That’s not able to be captured in a checklist.” There are no quotas because a call doesn’t count for much if the person on the other end hangs up without answers. Answer: No. Patience isn’t one of your virtues. That may be an asset for some roles, but contact tracing can be slow work, says Celentano. Rushing through a call could mean missing elements of a person’s medical history that put them at higher risk or failing to track down close contacts who may have been exposed.
ple’s stories,” Celentano says, and the work can take an emotional toll. But it’s also a way to support the community during these strange and challenging times. “It is uplifting. It is a frontline service.” For now, city employees and UCSF medical students have been tapped to do much of San Francisco’s contact tracing work, but eventually librarians may go back to libraries and city attorneys may go back to courtrooms. Then, it’s possible contact tracing jobs will open up for everyday folks who have the right skill set and temperament to do this sensitive and crucial work. Do you have what it takes to be a contact tracer? Take this quiz to find out.
1 When you get a haircut, does your hairdresser end up detailing their recent breakup? When you hop in a Lyft, do you leave with your driver’s life story? Do random strangers tend to open up to you about whatever’s going on in their world? Answer: Yes. You’re good at building rapport, one of the most important skills for a contact tracer. A big part of the job is getting people to share: how they’re feeling, where they’ve been, who they’ve seen and what they need. Making strangers feel comfortable over the phone is a crucial step one. Answer: No. Talking to strangers is the backbone of contact tracing work. If that’s not your thing, it might be tough to convince people to reveal who they may have exposed or what they need to stay isolated until they recover.
of Public Health every time you pick up the phone. That means you have to be confident taking a person’s medical history, asking follow-up questions to confirm potential coronavirus symptoms and covering socio-economic topics with a stranger not usually broached in casual conversation. You may also have to push gently or approach questions from different angles to get especially cautious or reserved contacts to reveal what they’re experiencing. Answer: No. While nonmedical professionals can be trained as contact tracers, you will have to talk about confidential medical information in a calm, serious manner. If hearing about vomit makes you woozy or you can’t talk about bowel movements without giggling, this may not be the gig for you.
2 Let’s talk symptoms and socio-economic issues. Are you comfortable asking follow-up questions about a stranger’s medical history or bout of diarrhea? Can you navigate delicate queries about someone’s living situation and ability to self-isolate? Answer: Yes. As a contact tracer, you’re not playing the role of medical provider or therapist, but you are representing the Department
3 You have to share bad news with someone you know. Are you up to making the call and talking through a negative situation without trying to impose a positive spin? Can you speak frankly about people’s problems without finding the bright side? Answer: Yes. For many people, hearing they may have been exposed to the coronavirus or may have exposed others is frightening. Con-
6 Your mom is sharing the frustrations of her day while you scribble a grocery list and try to sort out the senior hours at Safeway. Does juggling multiple tasks come naturally? Do you feel at ease with a variety of balls in the air? Answer: Yes. Being able to navigate multiple tasks simultaneously is key to contact tracing. You might be listening carefully to a patient sharing their fears while trying to find a window to have groceries delivered and using a potentially clunky technical system to track their information. If that sounds like a doable lineup to handle, you’re in good shape. Answer: No. If you prefer to give your complete, undivided attention to a single task before moving on, this work might be a challenge. 7 You have a tough day at work or hear upsetting news from a family member. Can you step back, take a deep breath and recharge? Are you emotionally resilient and able to separate your own mental wellbeing from work? Answer: Yes. Contact tracing requires deep empathy, but hearing the struggles and fears of community members can be emotionally exhausting work. In order to pick up the phone tomorrow (and in the months of the pandemic still to come) and connect with
people who need your attention, you have to be able to put today’s calls behind you and give yourself a mental break. Answer: No. Being deeply empathetic isn’t a bad thing, but in contact tracing — as in many medical jobs — separating your emotional state from your work is key to doing the job well. 8 You wake up one morning and your bus stop has moved a block away. Or your favorite lunch spot is now only offering to-go meals ordered a day in advance. Do you roll easily with the change of location/procedure? Are you able to adjust to your new normal quickly and forge ahead full steam? Answer: Yes. You adapt to change lightningquick, and that’s crucial to being an effective contact tracer. In August, we know more about how the virus works than we did in April, and in October we’ll know more than we do today. As virologists learn more about how COVID-19 spreads and public health officials develop new guidelines to prevent it, you need to digest new information and deliver it quickly, even when people may be hung up on last month’s best practice. Answer: No. The most consistent thing about the coronavirus pandemic has been inconsistency. That can be extremely unsettling. If a sudden change of course derails you, adapting to a pandemic-in-progress is probably not your best line of work. Before this outbreak is over, what we know about the virus and public health best practices are likely to change — again and again. BONUS: Do you speak a language other than English fluently? Are you a member of a community that has been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19? Answer: Yes. Contact tracing relies heavily on communication, and language barriers can make that difficult. San Francisco’s Latino population makes up 50% of the city’s COVID-19 cases, so Spanish-speaking contract tracers and members of the Latino community are extremely important to ensuring that complete information and resources are available to some of the hardest hit neighborhoods. Answer: No. That’s OK. You can track COVID in English, too.
* * *
Did you answer mostly “yes”? You’re a good listener, comfortable talking to strangers about sensitive subjects and flexible in the face of uncertainty and change. You may have the skills to be a contact tracer. “It’s not an easy job,” says Celentano, who has been training furloughed city employees to serve in this critical role. “The amount that these folks have had to get out of their comfort zone and do something new. … People have every right to feel pride at what they’re doing to stop the epidemic.” San Francisco isn’t hiring contract tracers right now, but the pandemic is far from over, and you’ve got the traits to help. Get your resume ready. Did you answer mostly “no”? It may sound like a simple gig, but contact tracing requires a wide range of skills in order to make people feel at ease and gather sensitive information to help slow the spread of a deadly disease. In other words, it’s not for everyone. San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Ananya Panchal contributed to this quiz.
Sarah Feldberg is Throughline editor at The Chronicle. Email: sarah.feldberg@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sarahfeldberg
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REWRITING THE RULES
O PT I M I S M RAT I N G Hopeful: These law enforcement reforms are years away, but Berkeley is committed to change and setting the stage for what could be a vanguard program.
TRAFFIC STOPS, 911 CALLS: B E R K E L E Y R E T H I N KS T H E RO L E O F P O L I C E I N E V E RY DAY L I F E By Ryan Kost
IN THE FUTURE
A World In Which The First Responders To Public Safety Issues Are No Longer Just The Police In the dispatch center …
Hello, 911 dispatch. What is your emergency?
Help, there’s a man unconscious at the park. Please send someone to check on him... he looks like He needs help...
Artificial intelligence and data algorithms help determine who should respond to the call.
We’ll send someone immediately.
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... No one is in danger. ... The police aren’t the right choice ... Their mission is to investigate crime and respond to violent situations only.
At the police station...
... There is no fire ... the person in distress seems to need a mental health check ... We do not need the fire department...
Six years ago in Ferguson, Mo., almost to the day, police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown Jr. A great unrest followed, first in Missouri, and then nationwide. ¶ On Nov. 24, 2014, a grand jury declined to indict Wilson. Brown’s family released a statement shortly thereafter. They were “profoundly disappointed” with the verdict. And they asked supporters to “join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.” This was back when Barack Oba-
At the fire station...
ma was president; body cameras and bias training felt like substantive solutions to the intractable problem of police violence. Six years later on May 25, George Floyd lost his breath and life as Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Again a great unrest followed, first in Minneapolis, and then nationwide. Only this time the officer was charged and arrested — and the demands went beyond body cameras and reform. Bearing witness was no longer enough. In the weeks following Floyd’s death, protesters pushed to “defund” and “abolish” police departments nationwide. This, they said, was a time for a wholesale re-imagining of what public safety could look like. Cities across the country are grappling with what this might mean. Locally, Berkeley has emerged as a potentially radical model for reimagining the role of the police. In mid July, city council members voted to pass several public safety reforms in a single omnibus bill. Some grab headlines — a new traffic enforcement agen-
W H AT M I G H T A T RA F F I C STO P LO O K L I K E ? There is a future without traffic stops. This is a future without humans at the wheel of most vehicles — a future in which we can’t speed, run a red light or drive drunk. This is a future in which selfdriving cars will shuffle us around using advanced artificial intelligence to navigate the road. None of this is that far away. Self-driving vehicles could be commercially available in a decade and ubiquitous not long after that. “As a Black man, I can’t wait for that day,” Bartlett says. After all, in study after study, Black and brown drivers are stopped and searched more often during routine traffic patrols. So what about in the meantime? BerkDOT and automated enforcement offer one future: Berkeley decides to focus on the most critical threats to public safety, rather than minor traffic infractions. So there are speed and red-light cameras up on high-injury streets throughout the city. If you break the law, you get a ticket in the mail, no bias involved. (The council has also moved toward a restorative justice approach. Rather than issuing fines, which can be regressive and hit lower-income earners harder, the city requires community service as restitution.) But this doesn’t happen often. Most of the time you’re a good driver. One night, though, your taillight is out. A BerkDOT officer — unsworn, unarmed and separate from the Police Department — notices and pulls you over. This won’t result in a pretextual vehicle search. It’s simply a
“You can boil so much of this down to the idea that not every first response requires a first responder in the ways that we’re used to thinking about them. Not every call merits an armed reaction.” R I G E L RO B I N SO N , Berkeley City Council member
cy, separate from the Police Department, called BerkDOT; and a new network of first responders. Others are less flashy but no less integral to the overall vision — a deep dive into public safety data and significant budget reductions.
matter of awareness. “You can boil so much of this down to the idea that not every first response requires a first responder in the ways that we’re used to thinking about them,” says City Council member Rigel Robinson, who helped propose BerkDOT. “Not every call merits an armed reaction.” The interaction goes smoothly. The official tells you about your taillight and issues a “fix-it” ticket. A week later you mail the department proof of the repaired light and avoid any fine. “The basic idea would be that we would essentially separate most traffic enforcement activities from the police,” says Ben Gerhardstein, a member of the coordinating committee for Walk Bike Berkeley. (The group lobbied for the new department.) “A traffic stop would be a traffic stop. It wouldn’t be peering into somebody’s past, or an opportunity to get them. The point would be creating a safe street environment.” “It can be a national model for how we shift traffic enforcement outside of police enforcement,” says Mayor Jesse Arreguin. Back to today: Few cities release data about how their police officers spend their time. A recent analysis by the New York Times shows officers in Sacramento have spent nearly 20% of their time this year responding to traffic incidents. Seattle officers spent 15% percent of their time on traffic calls. There has been some resistance to BerkDOT — drunk drivers, for instance, are a central concern. Mothers Against Drunk Driving has come out against it, arguing it takes significant training to be able to identify impaired driving. Proponents, like Gerhardstein, acknowledge this. “DUI enforcement scenarios are one that we’re going to have to be really careful about.” And then there are concerns about unarmed officials handling these incidents. However, one recent and comprehensive study published in the Michigan Law Review examined thousands of stops over 10 years in more than 200 Florida agencies and found that “the rate for an assault against
These reforms are years away. The council has committed to gathering extensive public input. Still, Ben Bartlett, one of eight Berkeley City Council members, calls this “a titanically different conversation” or “titanic stuff.” “When you’re trying to do something unprecedented, there’s no precedent for it.” This vision faces major barriers — a city budget decimated by a global pandemic, a police association protective of the bureau’s budget and a tangle of municipal, state and federal rulemaking, just to name a few. But, in the spirit of the Throughline, we asked city leaders, advocates and experts to imagine a future (10, 15, 20 years from now) should Berkeley make good on these promises. They didn’t offer much in the way of the fantastical. Reform, instead, was a matter of practical steps that might, one day, result in new futures. Here are some scenarios.
officers (whether it results in injury or not) was only 1 in every 6,959 stops.” Serious injury was 1 in every 361,111 stops. Still, say Robinson, Bartlett, Gerhardstein and Arreguin, armed officers could be on call for the most extreme cases.
Hi there. I’m from social services. We heard that you might need help? ...Are you doing OK? Remember when we had to record that kind of stuff with our Smartphones?
Meanwhile, a block away …
...Infraction... Not dangerous... Ticket issued... Officer intervention unnecessary.
Yeah! I’m glad that’s over with.
... A social worker seems to be the right choice.
Roger that, TrafficBot.
“Click”
The end — for now... Script: Alex K. Fong / The Chronicle; Illustrations: John Blanchard / The Chronicle
W H AT H A P P E N S W H E N YOU CA L L 9 1 1 ? A family member is struggling with mental illness and you can’t help — or you see somebody on the street who needs assistance. You call 911. Emergency dispatch has been moved out of the Berkeley Police Department and is now under the city’s Fire Department. Of course, you don’t notice. You talk to an operator as you describe your emergency. Or maybe you tap a button on your watch or phone. A combination of algorithms and artificial intelligence go to work. Using historical data and predictive models, the operator quickly assembles a Specialized Care Unit. “One of the things we passed was a deep, deep analysis of call-and-response data,” Bartlett says. “The whole experience of dispatch is going to have to be upgraded. It’s going to have to become smarter. There are too many inputs for that person to figure out and respond to fast enough.” This care unit might include emergency medical technicians, social workers, psychologists, firefighters — or, in very specific instances, armed officers. These individuals will have to be culturally
competent, too, able to relate to the communities they serve. “Too often, we have the square peg, round hole issue … you’re going to need that (cultural competence) because the people who are most down and out are Black people and brown people.” Based on an exhaustive study of previous calls, and the input from this call, the algorithm offers the dispatcher a combination of a social worker, psychologist and EMT. They put the call through and make sure that the group includes somebody who can connect with the person in need on a cultural and lingual level. Those same algorithms would also help calibrate staffing levels. “So much of the heart of these issues is really about triage,” Robinson says. “Right now cities aren’t great at that.” This group knows that if the situation turns violent, a police officer is on call. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, they are able to use a variety of best practices to calm the situation and offer
access to wide-ranging social services. Back to today: According to Mayor Arreguin, around 40% of calls to the city’s Police Department are related to “incidents around mental health and homelessness.” As a result, “increasingly our police are social workers.” This, he says, isn’t an effective use of their time. Instead the city should focus on “the programs and services that people need.” Data is a key piece of all of this by helping to inform dispatch needs and identiy potential biases in policing.“We dramatically overestimate how much technology we use today in gauging our response” to crime, says John Roman, senior fellow for NORC, formerly the National Opinion Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago. “I think we’re all seen too many TV shows about how police police ... and our basic understanding of what they do and what their job entails doesn’t match reality.”
W H AT WOU L D PO L I C E O F F I C E RS D O? Police no longer patrol city streets looking for expired tags and broken taillights. They no longer spend time investigating noncriminal traffic incidents. They no longer spend time responding
Policing continues on G8
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SFChronicle.com | Sunday, August 16, 2020 |
REWRITING THE RULES
OVERCROWDED & LETHAL PRISONS: CA N T H E STAT E SAV E L I V E S B Y R E L E AS I N G 50,000 P R I SO N E RS? YES
F E AS I B I L I T Y RAT I N G Red light: While the logic behind releasing 50,000 inmates from state prisons is reasonable, the political hurdles are too great for this to happen.
“There are models for compassionate living in prison that we could give to society. There are fathers we could give to their families. There are mothers we could give to their families.”
By Jason Fagone
E
Emile DeWeaver has been counting his blessings during the pandemic. The 42-year-old has a good job with Pilot, a successful tech startup that helps companies handle bookkeeping and tax preparation. As a product specialist who deals with clients online and over the phone, he can work remotely, from a place in East Oakland he shares with four housemates. He pays his rent and owns some stock. He even has a handful of chickens in his backyard, in a small coop next to mature lemon and orange trees that pop with fruit. ¶ “Very few people from Oakland can afford to live in Oakland. I live in Oakland,” DeWeaver told me on a recent evening, sitting in a chair in the
backyard and drinking a mug of green-black tea. A wiry, bookish Black man, he wore glasses and a T-shirt that said Democracy Needs Everyone. “I’m very lucky, and that’s generally the tenor of my life since being out of prison.” DeWeaver is one of only a few hundred Californians in the last decade who have had their criminal sentences commuted by the governor. When he was just 18, in a flash of violence in Oakland, he shot and killed a neighborhood rival at a dice game, resulting in a conviction for first-degree murder; he was also convicted of shooting and injuring a witness, and received a sentence of 67 years to life. Twenty years later, he was a published writer, the founder of his own justice-reform nonprofit and a leader of the first Society of Professional Journalists chapter at San Quentin State Prison. Everyone from Stanford professors to tech-industry professionals testified that he had transformed himself and was serving the community. In 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown agreed, commuting DeWeaver’s sentence to a lesser charge and allowing him to walk free a year later. DeWeaver’s experience suggests that a violent act doesn’t freeze someone in amber, that an offender is more than just the offense, and he says he’s not an exception. There are tens of thousands of others in California’s 35 prisons who could be safely returned to their communities, he said, if the governor wanted to do it — and if the public supported him. Which, judging by opinion polls, it wouldn’t, because many people have an idea of violent offenders that are “based on what media has built in our head, and based on our worst fears,” DeWeaver said. “People are reasonably afraid of that image.” But it’s not the image he has seen and lived: “This idea of ‘violent offender’ is way more complicated and counterintuitive than people understand.” Justice-reform groups have been shouting about the harms of mass incarceration for decades. But the need to rethink our idea of violent offenders has grown more urgent during the pandemic, when the virus has turned prisons into hot zones, killing incarcerated people and staff, straining hospital resources and putting entire communities at risk. COVID-19 has proved the point of the reformers — America’s jam-packed prisons are threats to public safety — and at the same time, it has created a window for change. It won’t stay open for long, though, and no one wants to waste the chance for change. In June, after touring San Quentin and documenting a range of unsafe conditions that were allowing the virus to burn through the buildings, a team of University of California health experts said that the prison should be substantially emptied, its population reduced by 50%, amounting to about 1,700 men. The same logic, the experts said, would apply to other overcrowded state prisons. The total number of people incarcerated in California prisons is about 100,000; getting to a 50% reduction would mean letting go of 50,000 humans. Is this possible? The short answer is yes. The state has the power. The main obstacle is political: Three-fourths of all prisoners have been convicted of violent acts. This means that decarcerating the state system by 50% would require the release of large numbers of people convicted of violent crimes. Is it possible to do that safely? A wealth of evidence suggests that the answer, again, is yes. All it would require is a fresh look at the data. And some political courage.
***
The first thing to understand is that prison systems have been emptied before, successfully, in foreign countries and the U.S. — including California. Rewind to 2006, four years into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first term as governor. Decades of tough-on-crime policies had left California’s 35 prisons dangerously overcrowded: De-
T H E PAT H TO A 5 0 % R E DUCT I O N The numbers in a few categories of incarcerated people who could safely be released, according to the experts.
5,000 Older than 65. Studies show that offenders tend to “age out” of violence.
50,000 Considered “high risk” for COVID-19, many with existing medical problems such as cancer, diabetes, bad lungs, heart issues.
30,000 Eligible for release within a year if the state corrections department — already releasing those within 180 days of freedom — broadened its window.
4,000 Women, who are often the accomplices of men or victims of abuse, and whom corrections department data show have lower recidivism rates than men
signed to hold 80,000 souls, they teemed with 170,000, making it impossible for prison health care workers to provide decent medical care. In October 2006, Gov. Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency, saying people in prison were in “extreme peril,” and a lawsuit filed by prisoners over the dangerous conditions, known as the Plata case, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices ruled in 2011 that “crowding creates unsafe and unsanitary conditions” and upheld an earlier court decision that required California to empty its prisons of almost 40,000 bodies within two years. California pulled it off, making a series of policy changes. The corrections system redirected large numbers of people convicted of nonviolent crimes to county jails, and most parole violators were also diverted to jails instead of being returned to prison. Then, in 2014, state voters passed Proposition 47, which turned some felony drug and theft crimes into misdemeanors. Together, these efforts slashed the state’s prison population by a remarkable 45,000 souls by 2015. Before the releases — a process now known as “Realignment” — California prison officials warned that the violent crime rate would surely rise. Instead, according to detailed studies by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California and academic researchers, the state’s violent crime continued to hover at about the same level it was in the 1960s — a historic low. “There were no impacts on violent crime,” said Magnus Lofstrom, the institute’s policy director of criminal justice. Another way of putting this: Today there is about the same amount of violent crime in California as when the state incarcerated five times fewer people. After Realignment, data did show a brief uptick in property crimes like car theft, but even that fluctuation soon disappeared, returning to a baseline that is also historically low, Lofstrom said. Realignment didn’t touch the violent offender population. No one wanted to go there, California politicians least of all. For someone like Gov. Gavin Newsom, who grew up in the Willie Horton era, “The idea of having 20,000 potential Willie Hortons out there is scary,” said Jonathan Simon, professor of criminal justice law at UC Berkeley. But according to Simon and other researchers who have put the system under the microscope, the picture isn’t so blackand-white, and the hard lines drawn by the state are made of myth, not science. “The distinction we’re always making between violent and nonviolent people? We have to let go of it, because it has no correlation with public safety,” said Hadar Aviram, professor of law at UC Hastings in San Francisco. Aviram has spent decades gathering data on violent offenders and their journeys through the system. Over and over again, across states and eras, she has found that there is no link between a person’s crime and the risk they may pose to the public. People who commit more serious crimes may be less of a risk, depending on how long they have been in prison and how old they are. Even those who committed murder can be safe to release: According to a study by the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, between 1995 and 2010, 48.7% of all paroled prisoners in California went on to commit new crimes, but among prisoners convicted of murder who were released, the rate was a minuscule 0.58%. Some of the starkest evidence comes from Maryland. In 1996, a man serving a life sentence for murder, Merle Unger, claimed in a legal petition that his trial judge had given improper instructions to the jury. After years of court battles, the Maryland Court of Appeals finally agreed with Unger in 2012,
Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle
Emile DeWeaver, a former San Quentin inmate, at his Oakland home. DeWeaver’s sentence was commuted in 2017, and he says many more prisoners could safely be returned to their communities.
opening a door for hundreds of other state prisoners — most convicted of murder — to challenge their own sentences on the same grounds. Since then, about 200 “Ungers” have won their freedom, and a study performed six years after the court decision found that less than 3% of those released had gone back to prison for a new crime or parole violation, well below the 40% recidivism rate for all Maryland offenders. The Ungers are just old men — the same kind of men who mentored a young Emile DeWeaver. Landing in the corrections system as a teenager, waiting in a county jail to be transferred to a state prison, DeWeaver received some crucial guidance from an older man there, he recalled. The man was connected to a prison gang known as the Black Guerrilla Family; his fingertips, as DeWeaver later wrote, “were blunt and burned from hard labor and the hot glass of crack pipes.” But instead of recruiting DeWeaver, the man gave him pointers on how to avoid joining a gang, and that advice allowed DeWeaver to stay independent and avoid physical altercations in dangerous prison yards for 21 years. “He saved my life,” DeWeaver said. “Everything I have ever
105.9k Total number incarcerated in California prisons
54.7k Total number out on parole
46.9% 2019 recidivism rate for offenders released from state prison in the 2014-2015 fiscal year
learned, I learned from a violent offender.” Once you accept that some violent offenders can be safely returned to their communities, mass decarceration suddenly looks plausible, Aviram said, because now you can release broad categories of people. The state has already dipped its toe in this strategy during the pandemic, selecting a few limited groups — no violent offenders, no sex offenders and no one convicted of domestic violence — and speeding their alreadyscheduled releases, to free up space for social distancing. A few thousand have gotten out through these programs. “If you just zhush the categories a little bit,” Aviram said, “the few thousands turn into tens of thousands.” For instance, she said, you could release 5,000 people in custody who are older than 65. A slew of studies shows that offenders “age out” of street crime in their mid- to late-twenties, growing less violent as they get older, like the Ungers. So you wouldn’t need to stop at 65. Prison life is brutal on bodies; the food is bad, the days are stressful. “When you’re 50 and Prisons continues on G8
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REWRITING THE RULES
YES, AN UP SIDE: O U R DATA T RA I L I N OUR NEW WO R L D
Prisons from page G7
you’ve spent 30 years in prison,” she said, “you’ve aged much faster than people on the outside.” About a quarter of all those incarcerated are over the age of 50. Aviram was just warming up. She kept zhushing the categories, reeling off numbers. Next she wanted to talk about people with medical conditions like cancer, diabetes, bad lungs, heart issues — sitting ducks for the virus. According to the state’s prison health care system, 50,000 incarcerated people have at least one “high risk” factor making them especially vulnerable to COVID-19. And speaking of risk, she continued, what about the 60,000 prisoners considered “low risk to reoffend”? The state gives incarcerated people a score from 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest risk and 5 the highest. The score is supposed to measure the likelihood that a person will commit new crimes once released. Half of all people in the California system have the lowest score, 1. Risk, of course, is a relative concept. According to the state, 48% of the lowestrisk offenders will be arrested on a new felony charge within three years of release; a score of 1 doesn’t mean they’re “safe.” Aviram’s response: So what? Lots of people in the outside world are committing crimes, too. “I can do this all day,” she said. Next she talked about ways to speed up the existing release process. People get out of prison every day under normal circumstances simply because their sentences end. Already this year, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has expedited the release of a few thousand people who were within 180 days of freedom. By the same logic, Aviram said, the state could stretch that window from 180 days to a full year. That’s 30,000 more people. How about releasing 4,000 women? Today, the state locks up enough women to fill two entire prisons. But typically, when women are convicted of felonies, they’re the accomplices of men or they’re victims of abuse themselves, said Simon, the Berkeley professor. Recidivism rates for women are lower than for men, CDCR data show. Simon argued that most every woman now in a state prison could safely serve her time at home. Altogether, by pulling people from some or all of these categories, the California prison system could identify the 50,000 people necessary to achieve a 50% cut in population. In May, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a prison-reform coalition, urged the governor to conduct the releases in multiple “waves,” recommending that a minimum of 50,000 people be included in the first wave. Amber-Rose Howard, the group’s executive director, said that the virus has shown the prison system to be overstuffed, brittle and deadly. “Now is the time that we fix things.”
By Peter Hartlaub
Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle 2019
In 2019, inmates participate in San Quentin State Prison’s marathon. In June, a team of UC health experts documented unsafe health conditions at the prison and said its population should be reduced by 50%.
“The distinction we’re always making between violent and nonviolent people? We have to let go of it, because it has no correlation with public safety.” H A DA R AV I RA M , professor of law at UC Hastings in San Francisco.
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If the governor wanted to decarcerate at scale, he could. There are a few levers to pull. One is to declare an emergency, like Schwarzenegger did in 2006 to alleviate overcrowding; multiple groups have asked Newsom to do the same in the COVID-19 crisis. Reformers say that large releases could also be achieved through the existing clemency process — a kind of sword in the stone of the state Constitution, an awesome power there for Newsom’s taking. Article 5 allows the governor to substitute less severe punishments for existing ones, giving him wide latitude to alter people’s fates by commuting their
Policing from page G4 to calls about mental illness or homelessness. “So much of their time is spent on social policing, responding to people in crisis, roving and looking for the weakest links, and the weakest links are people who are unable to get their taillight fixed,” Bartlett says. “Essentially the vision for policing in Berkeley — and hopefully the rest of the country — is one of an elite cadre of licensed professional investigators who solve crimes.” Rather than the long list of responsibilities police shoulder now, Berekeley officers would be tasked mainly with detective work, responding to violent incidents and acting as backup for Specialized Care
Units. “They wouldn’t feel like an occupying army, and they wouldn’t feel like they’re stuck in the dregs,” Bartlett says. “I think it’ll lead to a happier force and better outcomes for the community.” The police force would also function as a preventive presence — “a force mainly composed of people who are trying to solve problems before they start,” says Roman. This wouldn’t mean over-policing of certain demographics. Instead they would partner with communitybased social workers to build relationships with the communities they serve. “They have to be redirected to help people in a new way,” Bartlett says. “Otherwise the govern-
sentences. Legal experts say the power could be wielded to release entire categories of incarcerated people; in a 2016 paper, Simon pointed out that European countries have done this successfully to relieve prison overcrowding. “The legal scaffolding is there,” said the Bay Area’s Kate Chatfield, senior adviser with the Justice Collaborative, a national group that advocates decarceration. “Somebody just needs to utilize it.” Unfortunately for those in prison, governors in California and other states tend to use their clemency powers sparingly, commuting the sentences of a few dozen handpicked individuals per year. Gov. Jerry Brown granted 283 commutations during eight years, more than his predecessors; so far, Newsom has issued 65 commutations in almost two years. The process is not based on science but on outmoded narratives of redemption; the application for a commuted sentence is submitted by the prisoner himself, and the core of it is a series of personal essays, which helps explain how Emile DeWeaver was able to win back his life. Soon after landing in prison, he decided to become a professional writer. He had to do it mostly alone — “I was, for the most part, an island,” he recalled — because until he got to San Quentin, he didn’t have access to writing groups or classes in other prisons. He learned sentence structure and comma placement from “The Elements of Style,” the famous writing guide by William Strunk and E.B. White. DeWeaver borrowed a copy of the book from another incarcerated man and stayed up all night writing down every word in longhand, creating a version for his own cell’s library. Over the years, through writing, he agonized over the crime for which he was deeply sorry, processing the mistakes he had made and the traumas of his youth: “It was my therapy.” And as he found healing, his literary skills improved. After about five years, he sent his first short stories to contests and literary journals. After nine years, he received his first kind, handwritten rejection letter from an editor. Then, three years later, he published his first piece of fiction, in the Lascaux Review: “I had never felt better in my life.” Transferred to San Quentin in 2011,
ment itself will lack legitimacy.” Back to today: Berkeley does not yet have public data around how its police officers spend their time — though that will come as part of the upcoming deep dive into public safety statistics. In Sacramento, however, noncriminal, traffic, medical and proactive incidents have, so far this year, accounted for 80% of how officers spend their time. Violent crime accounted for 4%.
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There is so much that could go wrong before any of this goes right — the budgets and unions and bureaucratic red tape. James Burch, the policy
DeWeaver helped launch a nonprofit group called Prison Renaissance there that supports rehabilitation programs led by incarcerated people, and along the way, he built relationships with media and tech professionals who would boost his clemency application and help him land on his feet after his 2018 release. This is another way that DeWeaver was lucky: Thanks to the strength of the network he created while locked up, he didn’t struggle to find housing or a job when he got out. As many as 30% of those released under normal circumstances don’t have a place to go, according to the state, and those returning to their communities from prison often need assistance with everything from finding an apartment to applying for a government I.D. and medical benefits. A common argument against decarceration is that these reentry services cost a lot of money, and they do. But right now, the state invests almost nothing in reentry programs — a few million here or there — and because state taxpayers spend an average of $81,000 per year just to keep a single relatively healthy person locked up, decarceration would save money, too. “Think about how expensive it is now,” Aviram said. “It’s always more expensive to keep people behind bars.” In the last two months, DeWeaver has been thinking and worrying about friends who are still inside. Everyone he knows at San Quentin has been infected. He says he wishes people could see what he saw during his 21 years. Inside prison, he said, “there is genius and there’s compassion and there’s creativity. There are models for compassionate living in prison that we could give to society. There are fathers we could give to their families. There are mothers we could give to their families.” There are teachers, there are mentors, and the difference between him and them is that “I spent a lot of time learning to write,” DeWeaver said in his yard as the sun faded beyond the fence. “And that’s it.” He paused. “And that is a tragedy.” Jason Fagone is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jason.fagone@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfagone
director of the Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project, looks to a broader and fuller social safety net — one that invests in housing and mental health and crisis intervention, so that calling a public safety hotline isn’t necessary to begin with. “Defunding the police,” he says, means increasing funding to any number of community-focused organizations. This in itself may have the potential to reduce the need for policing. A 2017 study out of New York University estimated that “every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9% reduction in the murder rate, a 6% reduction in the
violent crime rate, and a 4% reduction in the property crime rate.” Knowing this, Burch rejects the “urge to take our police force and imagine it in the future.” Let’s “step back from what our police is currently like,” Burch says. “We can imagine a different course for everything.” The course the Berkeley City Council has chosen will go too far for some and not far enough for others. Still, it offers a course nonetheless, a course full of both uncertainty and hope. Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost
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Peter Schwartz has been shaken by the events of the last six months. ¶ The futurist and senior vice president for strategic planning at Salesforce says there’s never been an event like this in his nearly half century working as a scenario planner — which started in the early 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute and includes consulting jobs for the movies “WarGames” and Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.” ¶ But he is not at all surprised by a world-altering pandemic, and says that no one should be. The warnings have been coming from some of the strongest thinkers in his field for decades.
“It is a profoundly different time, but not at all unexpected,” Schwartz said during an early August interview. “This was probably the most forecast discontinuity I’ve ever seen. I’ve written about it several times in the past. Many people have. This is not a black swan, this is a black elephant. This was a big elephant in the room, and we were just in denial about it.” Schwartz, 73, has moved operations from his downtown Salesforce office to his Berkeley Hills home, but he hasn’t slowed down. Along with providing advice for business leaders and politicians, Schwartz contributed to a Deloitte/Salesforce scenario planning collaboration earlier in the pandemic, titled “The World Remade by COVID-19,” which brought together much of the old Global Business Network, a consulting group that included Andrew Blau, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Katherine Fulton. The focus of our conversation was surveillance, but Schwartz also spoke to The Chronicle by video chat about his childhood interest in the future, reflections from some of the movies he worked on (including the underrated “Sneakers”) and the importance of diversity in predicting what comes next. The entire interview is available on The Chronicle’s Total SF podcast. Q: In terms of future scenarios, is there anything like COVID-19 that you’ve dealt with in your career? A: No. This is the greatest uncertainty that I’ve ever experienced. I went through the oil crises of the 1970s, the financial crises of the 1980s, the wars of the 1990s, the (terrorist attacks) of the 2000s, the financial crisis of 2008. This dwarfs them all because of the magnitude and the ubiquity. The whole world is experiencing this, and it is an enormous crisis on the scale of a war. And the outcomes are by no means predetermined. The uncertainty is still very great. Q: When you’re sitting down thinking of scenarios, how much are you looking at data and research and how much is pure imagination? A: Great scenarios are built out of both. Data matters a lot. This is not science fiction. … I’ve helped write sci-fi movies. You have much less constraint in the world of sci-fi movies. In the world of scenario planning you live in the world of facts. In this case, the dynamics of a virus are critically important. Policy choices that countries make and so on. These are all factual phenomena. But if you really want to see the surprises, it takes imagination. How could those trends change? How could these forces
Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle 2015
Salesforce VP Peter Schwartz says the uncertainty caused by the pandemic is the worst he’s ever seen.
“For security reasons, for convenience reasons, and now for health reasons — gradually we will accept much, much greater surveillance. And in the end we won’t be too bothered by it.” PETER SC H WA RTZ , senior vice president for strategic planning at Salesforce
L I ST E N TO T H E PO D CAST Peter Hartlaub’s entire interview with Peter Schwartz is available on the Total SF podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite streaming service, or listen at www. sfchronicle.com/ podcasts
combine in novel ways to produce surprising outcomes? Q: How much do you fight your own bias? Is that a struggle? A: Oh, that’s a huge issue. All the time. Because we’re all biased. I’m naturally an optimist. It’s easy to imagine how things go wrong. It’s much harder to imagine how things go right. … I need people to challenge my thinking. I’m American, I’m white, I’m 73, I’ve had a particular set of experiences, I went through the 1960s, and it helped shape who I am. … I am biased, so the way I deal with that is to make sure that in any conversation, I have a multiplicity of points of view. People who are prepared to challenge each other and challenge me. Every single time, with no exceptions, that I’ve gotten the future wrong, it’s because there was an inadequate diversity of people in the room. It was not that it couldn’t be seen, it was that we were just talking to ourselves. Q: Surveillance could be one of the things that saves us, but over time government surveillance has been seen as a bad thing by U.S. citizens. How is our relationship with surveillance evolving? A: I think it’s a very important question, and one we dealt with in “Minority Report.” It was clearly a surveillance society. The thing we got wrong about it was that it was not Washington, D.C., it was Beijing today. … I do think it’s a big issue, but I also think the honest truth is — for security reasons, for convenience reasons, and now for health reasons — gradually we will accept much, much greater surveillance. And in the end we won’t be too bothered by it because, in fact, for most people in most situations it will be more beneficial than harmful. There will be times when it’s abused, when data is stolen, when people are harmed by it. But for 99% of the people, 99% of the time, it will mean that you didn’t have to show your ticket to get on BART, it means you didn’t have to check out at the supermarket, it means that when somebody stole your kid’s bike it will have been seen. Oh, and that unhealthy people will be detected before I get on the airplane.
Q: It seems like a pretty fast shift. A: The honest truth is we are taking these steps today out of necessity. (In the future) we’ll have the choice. But my guess is that we’re going to be in a world with much greater electronic interaction. Much more digital in that respect, and our digital footprint will be everywhere. … We’re now in a global village where the truth is everything can be known about everybody. You can see my hot tub on Google Earth. Fortunately, I wasn’t in it when they took the last picture. … We actually are moving into that world of the global village, and we have to assume that everyone knows everything. And I think that will be the emerging reality. Q: You mentioned that you’re an optimist. When you’re having an optimistic moment, what are you thinking about? A: For most of us, this is the deepest crisis we’ve ever experienced. And it isn’t going to end anytime soon. The economy is going to struggle, we’re going to see more illness, more death, and so on. I don’t want to sugarcoat it in any way. But crises in the right sense can induce remarkable change. It invites reimagination and reinvention. ... My hope is that if we’re sitting here and talking a year from now, a number of things will have happened. We’ll have new political leadership at the national level, and we’ll have a kind of unifying response for the country and not a dividing response. It will be a very different world, but I think, on the whole, likely for the better. Many of us are reimagining and reinventing. For me that’s the upside of this. Every crisis invites you to do that. To come out of it with new tools, new capabilities, new opportunities. Is this the way I would choose to get there? Not at all. This is not my preferred scenario. But it is the reality of a terrible scenario that creates the necessity of invention that we can actually produce something far better than what we started with.
Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
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R E W R I T I N G T H E RU L ES
A BIT OF FICTION: ‘LEVEL 8 RISK’ By Beth Piatote
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The Chronicle photo illustration
Three years after the implant gave me an infection, I’m about to get another one. ¶ Another microchip implant, that is, and possibly another infection. I’d call it a level 3 risk. Implant infection was only a level 1 risk last time and I got one, so I’m upping the odds. Esau says it’s good to be prepared, especially with reentry on the horizon. Re-entry has been on the horizon the entire three years I’ve been here. Every time I get scanned the date pops up: May 1, 2028, embedded in the bar code as 010528. At first, I tried to memorize my whole ID, but the green digits on the screen always disappeared too quickly. Once I caught sight of the date in the sequence, I began to focus on that. And thus I became the date of my discharge, which seems as good an identity as any. It’s called discharge, not release or emancipation, because the Civilian BioMedical Corps (or CivCo for short) was designed to mirror the military structurally if not practically. I used to think of the Army and CivCo as twins, like my brother Saul and me, but CivCo is more like that spoiled step-brother who came along after Uncle Sam got remarried to his much younger second wife. Sorry to put you through that unpleasant metaphor with Uncle Sam. But I’m coming from a place rife with unpleasantness, despite the Google chefs, outdoor yoga and meditation on the regular. Staying healthy is our primary function here, and we know it. Staying healthy makes us better prepared for contagion and helps us recover faster once we’re sick. And faster recovery means faster harvesting of our antibodies, and faster delivery of the product to the market. Of course, there’s always the chance we could die, and that takes the sheen right off the shavasana. How do I account for making it through my term nearly unscathed? Probably my childhood of devotional prayers and raw milk, before we came to America. My mom logged extra prayers around 2023, once she had to register us for the lottery: Saul for the Army, and me for CivCo. The pandemics were rolling through one after the other, and the borders had been shut down for two years by then. After that, the only chance of gaining citizenship was for immigrant families to hand over their first-born for conscription. Because we were twins, we could optimize our odds. My mother thanked God for that, too. When Saul got into the Army and I got into CivCo, our family had a choice to make, and no one thought that Saul had a better chance of surviving than I did. We
I will have two chips for the rest of my life: the CivCo medical ID in my right hand, and my citizenship ID in my left. We carry our papers under the skin, not that anyone asks for papers anymore, except symbolically.
A B OU T THE AU T H O R Beth Piatote is a Bay Area writer. Her short story collection “The Beadworkers” was released in 2019 through Counterpoint Press.
figured the risk level of losing him was 8 (guns) and of losing me was 7 (germs). I argued hard that it should be me to go, because an immune system can overcome infection but not bullets. He argued that it should be him because it was unlikely that there would be war, given all the domestic unrest. I leveraged the widely held social belief that CivCo was a safer choice. Government ads highlighted beautiful CivCo barracks in former yoga retreat centers, and happy recruits playing volleyball and rock climbing. The CivCo promised fresh air and organic food every day, and reasonable odds of fighting off whatever virus I got bathed in. In the end, I prevailed over my brother. Now I’ll be coming out with a second implant, maybe an infection, and a killer immune system. I’ve also got a rock-hard core, thanks to all the planks. And of course, the big prize: citizenship. Anya, a fellow subject, says the big prize is coming out with your life. But I tell her I can’t think in life-and-death terms all the time. The implant will go in my left hand tomorrow, in that fleshy pocket between my thumb and index finger, that smooth hollow where Esau used to roll his thumb when he held my hand. Chances are I’ll never feel that again, implant or not. While I’ve been living as 010528 this whole time, Esau is 010929, giving him an extra 16 months of potentially fatal exposure to viruses (level 7 risk) and pretty lab Betties wanting to keep him company (level 4 to 10 risk, depending on control factors). Either way, tonight may be the last time I see him. Fraternizing among subjects has never been discouraged, officially or unofficially, as long as we follow health protocols. But love is contraindicated. I started to get the feeling that I might love Esau when I came out of the recovery lab last spring after beating the CORS2 virus, which had a 40% mortality rate in the corps. We both lost friends in that one. When I came out, still weak in the legs, Esau was waiting for me. And when he saw me, he did a cartwheel. I can’t say exactly why, but his gesture unlocked something in me. He seemed so free, not just with his body but with his heart. So what can I say? Sometimes you want someone to celebrate the simple fact that you exist, even when you can’t quite feel it yourself. And Esau made me feel that I made him feel so good he couldn’t even contain himself. But there was more to it, too. He was willing to be happy when so many of us suppressed it. Exuberance seemed like a grotesque display of good fortune after our comrades had died in the trial. The CORS2 trial had been a big setback for me. I’d lost muscle and verve. My body
had become a stranger to me, vomiting in one moment and shaking with fever in the next. As my system emptied itself out, things like ambition and desire drained away too. Lying in the hospital bed with tubes up my arm and electronic boxes blinking around me, I thought I’d never feel happy, attractive or angry again. If ever there had been a time to feel resentment against my family that I had become the sacrificial lamb, that was the time. Saul could have served his whole term in the Army and never been shot at, while I was guaranteed to be doused in pathogens. That was a level 10 risk — why did I ever argue otherwise? But I felt no resentment, no jealousy, nothing. And it was only because of Esau, and all his attention in the long recovery after, that I began to feel a spark for life again. He held my hand on movie night. And he kissed me after. And the next day, he came to me and said: Let’s do it again. I fell for all of it, because sometimes you want to feel like a woman and not just an antibody farm. Tomorrow my brother Saul will be waiting to pick me up. I can’t wait to see him again. He will get the microchip in his left hand too. And my mom, and my little brothers. We’ll all get our citizenship chips in our left hands. Native-born citizens have a righthand chip only, because their right hand goes over their heart. I will have two chips for the rest of my life: the CivCo medical ID in my right, and my citizenship ID in my left. We carry our papers under the skin, not that anyone asks for papers anymore, except symbolically. Some things I wish were only symbolic, but aren’t — like the idea that immigrants are the lifeblood of America, or that the missions were built with Indian bodies, or that the White House is a structure of slavery. Or that what comes around goes around. When the glaciers started melting big-time in the north, the newly released bacteria and organic matter that had been safely stored in the ice accelerated the pandemics. In Canada, they found that Inuits and Eskimos had some unique genetic material that helped them survive. In a mirror-like exchange of cells for citizenship, a band of young Indigenous activists offered to participate in Canadian medical trials in exchange for political autonomy — to opt out of Canadian citizenship. They bought their freedom just like I bought mine. It’s the kind of contract that sounds novel and not novel at once. The military has been making deals on citizenship for decades. There’s nothing new about living as a data point, as a string of numbers, although slipping the code under the skin rather than marking it on the surface is a bit of an advance. Soon everyone will be carrying their papers in the pillow of their hand, thanks to the miracle of the microchip. I try to imagine my right hand as it was before the first implant. I try to imagine my life without Esau. As strange as it has been, we’ve inhabited in our own little world of CivCo. No real contacts outside of our families, with no leaves for the whole term, because that could compromise the data. I love Esau, but I think it may be no more than passionate attachment borne of circumstance. Has this been real, or just a very, very long summer camp? Tonight may be the last time I see Esau. Ever. I may tell him I love him. I may tell him I’m afraid he will die. I may tell him he carried me through fevers and grief, and that I’ll be waiting for him when he comes out with his left-hand chip. But that may be too much. Too much risk to take.
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